Which track to take? Engineering or People management

This post lists the key insights from this article, from the CTO of HoneyComb, Charity Majors.

It’s primarily aimed at new managers, who aren’t sure what their career options look like or how to evaluate the opportunities that come their way, or how it may expand or shrink their future opportunities.

The first fork in the manager’s path

Every manager reaches a point where they need to choose: do they want to manage engineers (a “line manager”), or do they want to try to climb the org chart? — manage managers, managers of other managers, even other divisions. Almost everyone’s instinct is to say “climb the org chart”, but we’ll talk about why you should be critical of this instinct.

They also face a closely related question: how technical do they wish to stay, and how badly do they care?

Are you an “engineering MANAGER” or an “ENGINEERING manager”?

These are not unlike the decisions every engineer ends up making about whether to go deep or go broad, whether to specialize or be a generalist. The problem is that both engineers and managers often make these career choices with very little information — or even awareness that they are doing it.

“So you want to try engineering management.”

Hopefully you have already gathered that management is a career change, not a promotion, and you’re aware that nobody is very good at it when they first start.

That’s okay! It takes a solid year or two to find new rhythms and reward mechanisms before you can even begin to find your own voice or trust your judgment. Management problems look easy, deceptively so.

This is because you need to change your habits and practices, which in turn will actually change who you are. This takes time. Which is why …

The minimum tour of duty as a new manager is two years.

If you really want to try being a manager, and the opportunity presents itself, do it! But only if you are prepared to fully commit to a two year long experiment.

Commit to it like a proper career change. Seek out new peers, find new heroes. Bring fresh eyes and a beginner’s mindset. Ask lots of questions. Re-examine every one of your patterns and habits and priorities: do they still serve you? your team?

It takes more than one year to learn management skills and wire up your brain to like it. If you are waffling over the two year commitment, maybe now is not the time. Switching managers too frequently is disruptive to the team, and it’s not fair to make them report to someone who would rather be doing something else or isn’t trying their ass off.

It takes about 3-5 years for your technical skills to deteriorate.

But this state of grace doesn’t last very long. Your technical skills stop advancing when you become a manager, and instead begin eroding. Two years in, you aren’t the effective tech lead you once were; your information is out of date and full of gaps, the hard parts are led by other people these days.

More critically, your patterns of mind and habits shift over time, and become those of a manager, not an engineer.

Why can’t I just make a career out of being a combo tech lead + line manager?

Your job as a manager is to leverage your technical expertise to grow your engineers into great senior engineers and tech leads themselves. Your job is to empower and challenge and guide your team. Don’t suck up all the oxygen: you’ll stunt the growth of your team.

But your technical knowledge gets dated, and your skills atrophy. The longer it’s been since you worked as an engineer, the harder it will be to switch back.

And because so much of your credibility and effectiveness as an engineering leader comes from your expertise in the technology that your team uses every day, ultimately you will be no longer capable of technical leadership, only people management.

On being an “engineering manager” who only does people management

The great ones can make a large team thrum with energy. The great ones can break down a massive project into projects that challenge (but do not overwhelm) a dozen or more engineers, from new grads to grizzled veterans, pushing everyone to grow. The great ones can look ahead and guess which rocks you are going to die on if you don’t work to avoid them right now.

You will be advised to stop writing code or engineering

EThis is a terrible, horrible, no-good VERY bad idea that seems like it must originally have been a botched repeating of the correct advice, which is:

STOP WRITING CODE AND ENGINEERING IN THE CRITICAL PATH

Can you spot the difference? It’s very subtle. Let’s run a quick test:

Authoring a feature? NO

Covering on-call when someone needs a break? YES

Diving on the biggest project after a post mortem? NO

Code reviews? YES

Picking up a p2 bug that’s annoying but never seems to become top priority? YES

Insisting that all commits be gated on their approval? NO

Cleaning up the monitoring checks and writing a library to generate coverage? YES

Technical leadership track

You cannot afford to let yourself drift too far or too long away from hands-on engineering work. You need to consciously cultivate your path , probably by practicing some form of the engineer/manager pendulum.

If management isn’t a promotion, then returning to hands-on work isn’t a demotion, either. Right?

Honestly, I would try not to think of yourself as a manager at all: you are an “engineering leader” performing a tour of duty in management. You’re pursuing a long term strategy towards being a well-respected technologist, someone who can sling code, give informed technical guidance and explain in detail customized for to anyone at any level of sophistication.

Organizational leadership track

Here are a few reasons to think critically about climbing the ladder to director and executive roles.

Your choices shrink. There are fewer jobs, with more competition, mostly at bigger companies. (Do you even like big companies?)

You basically need to do real time at a big company where they teach effective management skills, or you’ll start from a disadvantage.

Bureaucracies are highly idiosyncratic, skills and relationships may or may not transfer with you between companies.

You are going to become less employable overall. The ever-higher continuous climb almost never happens, usually for reasons you have no control over.

Your employability becomes more about your “likability” and other problematic things.

Your time is not your own. Your flaws are no longer cute. You will see your worst failings ripple outward and be magnified and reflected.

You may never feel the dopamine hit of “i learned something, i fixed something, i did something”

You will go home tired every night, unable to articulate what you did that day. You cannot compartmentalize or push it aside.

Nobody really thinks of you as a person anymore, you turn into a totem for them to project shit on.

It’s pretty much a one-way trip.

Sure, there are compensating rewards. Money, power, impact.

You can’t go back and forth from engineering to executive, or even director to manager, in the way you can traverse freely between management and engineering as a technologist.